It may not yet be a household name like competitors Bruker or JASCO, but BioTools is holding its own, thanks to a risky investment ten years ago. The firm was incorporated in 2000 with the goal of commercializing vibrational circular dichroism (VCD) and Raman optical activity (ROA) spectrometers. “We were the first company to commercialize VCD as a standalone instrument,” President Rina Dukor told IBO.

VCD is a spectroscopic technique that detects differences in absorption of left and right circularly polarized light during a vibrational transition—essentially vibrational optical activity in the IR and NIR ranges. VCD is used for structural studies of small organic molecules, proteins and DNA and is especially useful for the analysis of chirality. “Absolute configuration of chiral molecules is probably the most in-demand application,” said Dr. Dukor, adding that 70% of molecules in development and 80% of drugs approved by the FDA last year are chiral. The absolute configuration of a chiral molecule can be identified by comparing the measured VCD spectrum with the calculated spectrum, which is found by using quantum chemistry methods. “I think that every single top-tier pharmaceutical company has purchased VCD or has done absolute configuration,” Dr. Dukor said, adding that the number of papers on the topic and users is growing exponentially. “We are estimating that about four thousand molecules have been done in the last few years.”

VCD competes with X-ray diffraction, which can be time consuming. VCD is a robust method that gives confirmation information on the molecule that cannot be obtained using other methodology, according to Dr. Dukor. VCD is not replacing crystallography, she said, but it is becoming more routine. Unlike NMR, another competitor, VCD requires no foreign additives to a sample and is not problematic for molecules with multiple chiral centers.

The main component of the firm’s success, said Dr. Dukor, is persistence. “We didn’t give up. It’s been over ten years. I just came from a chirality meeting, and people that we introduced the technique to ten years ago were sitting in the audience, and they all now do VCD.” Education was also a key component of the strategy. “We really took the time and educated the [organic, medicinal and analytical] chemists. We went up the line and educated the people responsible for providing the information to regulatory agencies.”

BioTools also offers ROA, a sister technique to VCD. ROA, which relies on the difference in intensity of Raman-scattered right and left circularly polarized light, reveals information about chiral centers in the sample. Laurence Barron, an inventor of the technique, just received the Chirality Medal. ROA is also up-and-coming. “It’s not as widespread as VCD as of yet, but it is certainly making its mark because it’s very sensitive and robust and provides a lot of insights into the structure of biological molecules,” said Dr. Dukor.

Dr. Dukor told IBO that next up for BioTools is new applications. “One is doing chiral reaction monitoring for process analytical technology. VCD allows us to monitor composition of drugs—molecular composition and chirality. The other big application is raw-material identification of chiral building blocks.” She added that another future endeavor is biologics research.